Movie icon ‘lost her virginity to her stepfather at 11,’ seduced her friend’s 17-year-old son… but took one forbidden secret to her grave

The grainy old home movies had been gathering dust in the back of a closet for decades.

Long after film actor Joan Crawford’s death in 1977, these private reels revealed a side of her that fans had never seen – and, some say, she never wanted them to see.

Among the predictable images of children’s birthday parties and family vacations were several mysterious cans sealed with masking tape and labelled: ‘Charles and me.’

In some shots, Crawford was on a hunting trip, trudging through a stream in waterproof boots and carrying a rifle. In others, she was cavorting on a rooftop with one of her beloved dachshunds. In at least one, she was sunbathing nude.

Celebrated for her sexually charged performances in films including Mildred Pierce and The Women, and considered one of the most fiercely ambitious stars of the day, here she was relaxed, unguarded and girlishly flirtatious.

Famously ashamed of her freckles – Crawford usually covered them with heavy foundation for the camera – she was make-up free in these shots, and clearly besotted with a mystery, middle-aged man with a pronounced widow’s peak.

But who on Earth was he?

In his new biography of the star, Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face, author Scott Eyman recalls her grandson Casey LaLonde showing him these old reels nearly a decade ago and asking if he had any idea who ‘Charles’ might be?

At the time, the biographer was in the midst of a book on Cary Grant. Then the pandemic hit, closing libraries across the country. So it took a few years before he could focus his attention on Crawford.

But when he finally did, he uncovered a forbidden love story – perhaps the four-times-married Crawford’s only true love. And a secret she took to her grave – almost.

If, as Eyman guessed, the home movies had been filmed around 1939 or 1940, they were shot just after Crawford’s divorce from second husband Franchot Tome and her marriage to another fellow actor, Phillip Terry. 

The author’s first stop was Crawford’s own autobiography, published in 1962, which he pored over for clues.

In it, he found a few brief paragraphs that refer to a nameless, ‘marvelously mature man’ she had fallen for.

She described a ‘long and lovely friendship’ during which he taught her to hunt and fish with his friends.

‘Carried my own gun and my own camera, waded through streams in the vanguard, and at noon when we’d camp, I’d help fix lunch and surprise them with all sorts of snacks packed away in my knapsack just in case they didn’t catch any fish.’

It was a titillating hint – but the man’s identity still eluded Eyman.

Then he uncovered an old piece by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper from 1940 that promised more.

‘Hopper included the name of one Charles McCabe in the cast list of an upcoming Crawford movie,’ Eyman wrote in the book. But there was no actor of that name.

Now armed with a second name, he kept digging until he identified the man he was convinced Crawford was deeply in love with. Charles McCabe was not another actor, but a powerful businessman – and publisher of the New York Daily Mirror. He was also married.

Hopper had found out about the forbidden affair, Eyman believes, and her thinly veiled article was her way of letting Crawford know she was on to her.

McCabe died in 1970 – seven years before Crawford – but LaLonde called one of the publisher’s surviving sons. What they told him seemingly confirmed everything. 

Following McCabe’s death, the sons allegedly told LaLonde, they had gone through their father’s papers and discovered several letters from Crawford that made it clear they had an intimate relationship.

But, since their mother had never known about the affair – and they didn’t want her finding out now – they had burned the letters, destroying all the evidence.

At the time of the relationship, however, it seems McCabe wasn’t quite so concerned about being unmasked as Crawford’s beau. 

‘A relationship with a public figure such as Crawford must have been risky for McCabe,’ wrote Eyman. ‘But the footage clearly indicates neither of them cared, while the fact that Crawford kept the movies for the rest of her life indicates the affair was far more than a passing fling.’

In fact, she told the writer Jane Kesner Ardmore that he was the one man she would give up all her fame for.

‘This man has to be nameless because he has a family,’ she wrote to her friend. ‘He can’t get a divorce. If he could, he’s the one man in the world for who I’d give up my career in a minute.

‘There are men who want to change women. He’s not one of them. We’ve been friends for years.

‘Other men have been lovers and competitors, but not friends.’

Eyman later wrote that, ‘Clearly, McCabe trusted Crawford’s discretion – the visual evidence could have blown his life sky high. McCabe is not wearing a wedding ring in any of the shots, and it’s clear she’s directing him to take specific positions for the camera.’

The affair is thought to have fizzled out by 1941 and, by the following year, Crawford was married to Terry – who appears to have been the polar opposite of his intellectually stimulating predecessor.

Crawford described Terry, somewhat unflatteringly, in her autobiography as ‘anodyne, comfortable and comforting.’

‘The men who’d attracted me before were passionate, volatile,’ she added. ‘The man in New York [who we now know to be McCabe] was a dynamo. But I couldn’t have him, and here was his antithesis, an easy-going, unpretentious man who seemed to adore me, who was calm and absolutely uncomplicated.’

The marriage ended in 1946.

One thing Terry did have going for him, however, was a passing resemblance to Clark Gable – albeit a clean-shaven one – with whom Crawford had a passionate on-off affair spanning decades.

And the pair soon picked up where they’d left off after her divorce from Terry.

Crawford, according to MGM’s head of publicity Howard Strickling, was less interested in sex for romantic ends and more for the power it afforded her.

‘She used it only as a weapon,’ he said. 

Part of Strickling’s job was to handle scandals for the stars of the day, including allegedly buying up copies of the pornographic movies Crawford had made before she was famous.

‘Joan was a pal to male stars,’ Strickling said. They were always glad to see her. She may have laid them, but it was nothing serious to her… I don’t think that Joan was very interested in sex.’

Indeed, in one episode of Ryan Murphy’s Feud, about the legendary rivalry between Crawford and Bette Davis, it is claimed that Crawford had ‘lost her virginity’ to her stepfather at the age of 11. 

There have long been rumors of a sexual relationship with her mother’s third husband, Henry Cassin – though, chillingly, it is never referred to as statutory rape and, in the episode, the actress (played by Jessica Lange) claims she ‘led’ Cassin into a consensual affair.

Eyman made no reference to either abuse or an affair with her stepfather in the book. Instead, he insisted that, ‘To the end of her life she considered him the only meaningful paternal figure she ever had.’

But if she had been groomed as a child, it might explain what some might consider her unconventional attitude toward sex.

‘Her attitude seems to have been basically utilitarian,’ Eyman wrote. ‘Sometimes sex was a straight physical transaction devoid of romance. Other times it verged on the sacramental.

‘She had affairs with actors on her own level – Spencer Tracy, who she said was “a real son of a bitch when he drank, and he drank all the time,” and the intermittent relationship with Clark Gable.‘

And, it seems, age was no barrier.

Former child star Jackie Cooper was just 17 and living with his mother near Crawford’s Brentwood, California, home when he had a torrid fling with his much older, and sexually wiser, neighbor.

‘He had an open invitation to use her badminton court,’ Eyman wrote. ‘One day she got him a Coke after a strenuous hour of batting the shuttlecock, when she noticed him looking down the front of her dress.’

He wrote that she flirted harmlessly with the teen before sending him on his way. But, instead, the bold Cooper made a move.

Over the next six months, they got together several times, as she instructed him in the delicate art of wooing a lady.

In his autobiography Please Don’t Shoot My Dog, Cooper described Crawford as ‘a very erudite professor of love… a wild woman.

‘She would bathe me, powder me, cologne me. Then she would do it over again.

‘She would put on high heels, a garter belt and a large hat and pose in front of the mirror, turning this way and that way.

‘I recognized that she was an extraordinary performer, that I was learning things that most men don’t learn until they are much older – if at all.’

‘There was never any drinking or drugs with her,’ Cooper added. ‘It was all business. She was very organized. When I left, she would put me on her calendar for the next visit. I could hardly wait.’

After their affair ended, they stayed in touch, and Crawford later congratulated him for his Emmy success directing M*A*S*H* and The White Shadow.

Crawford married once more, to Pepsi boss Alfred Steele, and they were together until his death in 1959. But, it seems, she never forgot the one man she could never have. 

Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face by Scott Eyman is published by Simon & Schuster